The Out-of-Place Artifact Iceberg | PART 4

The Bimini Road. The Bimini Road, or wall, refers to parallel rows of strangely artificial-looking stone blocks, just a half mile off the beach of Bailey's Town, one of two towns on the island of North Bimini, which is itself basically just offshore from Miami, Florida, being just 80 kilometers away, since North and South Bimini are the closest part of the Bahamas to Florida. The longest of those rows is 1,600 feet long and ends in a J-shaped bend, which people point to as evidence of its artificial origins, but the sizes of the quote-unquote blocks which make up these rows vary considerably, and there are some seemingly very clear-cut sections and other less convincing sections filled with random fractures. There's also only a single layer of these blocks, so it's more often referred to as a road than as a wall, even if most Bimini Road enthusiasts think it was something else, like a harbor breakwater, and not just any breakwater, the breakwater of Atlantis. And that's because it was discovered by a guy named J. Manson Valentine on September 2nd, 1968, after the sediment formerly overlying the road had eroded away. Which is a big deal, because a famous early 20th century American psychic named Edgar Cayce believed that the Bahamas were the last traces of Atlantis above water, and he psychically predicted that Atlantis would rise again near Bimini in 1968 or 69, all the way back in 1940. So basically, since its discovery, it's been associated with Atlantis. But I mean, if this row of blocks is all that's left of it, I'd be pretty disappointed, and so there have been several attempts at finding more of its remains in the surrounding waters. Valentine was the first person to propose that they're of artificial origin in a paper for the Miami Museum of Science published the year after his discovery in 1969, and he and some others, inspired by Cayce's predictions, formed a group called the Marine Archaeology Research Society, or MARS, which supposedly discovered clusters of submerged cement and marble columns, one supposedly in a circular formation around two miles away from the Bimini Wall. More anomalies like these were discovered by a group named SEAS, the Scientific Exploration and Archaeological Society, including what they claim to be a regularly spaced pile of stones running for a mile and a half at an oblique angle to Bimini's beach, which is supposed to prove that it has to be artificial. Then starting in 1974, a Texas-based English professor named David Zink began exploring the road with funds from the Cayce Foundation, as well as the area around it, in a series of highly publicized expeditions ending in 1979. It culminated in a book entitled Stones of Atlantis, in which he claims to have found a marble statue head, an obelisk, and this real building block. I mean, obviously the first two aren't real, but the third one clearly is, although it could have easily come from modern times, especially since it was minimally covered by marine life. Apparently this was enough to convince Zink that the Bimini Road was built by aliens from the Pleiades, because in that same book, that's exactly what he does. As you can probably tell by the tone of my voice, I don't think that the Bimini Road was left by aliens or Atlanteans or anyone else for that matter, because it's probably just something called beach rock. Beach rock refers to slabs of cemented sand that form pretty rapidly just beneath the sands of the intertidal zones of warm tropical seas and distinct ridges parallel to beaches. Sound familiar? Beach rock can form so rapidly that sandy sediment even just a few centimeters under a beach's surface can be lithified within just 30 years, which has led to various modern artifacts like beer bottles, glass, pottery, nuts, and of course bolts being found stuck in some instances of it. Back in the late 70s, a geologist named Eugene Shin, who was working for the U.S. Geological Survey used hydraulic drills to take 18 half-foot long cores out of the Bimini Road to determine whether or not its rocks were natural, and those cores showed that they lie directly on weathered Pleistocene limestone preceding the sedimentation that had created the beach rock. Also, the beach rock of the road is identical to the beach rock currently forming on Bimini's beaches. The different cores all had identical continuous internal stratification, and c-dating of conch shell fragments stuck in the rock conducted by Shin dates them to between 3510 and 2745 years ago, and c-dating conducted earlier by another geologist named John Gifford dates the main part of the road to around 4000 BC, so the Bimini Road isn't artificial. Even if it was, it's way too recent to be Atlantis, which was 9000 years old according to Plato. And about that, every claim that it's artificial relies almost entirely on how some parts of it vaguely resemble cut stone blocks, but that look could have easily been created by its exposure to the sun in combination with the constant wetting and drying of the tide, causing the road to crack into different slabs, ironically like how real concrete roads do after a while. Constant abrasion by shifting wave-driven beach sands then expanded and rounded those cracks, giving the Bimini Road stones their distinctive, rounded, pillow-like shape. Similarly distinctive, artificial-looking shapes can be found among other beach rocks, like on the eastern side of Loggerhead Key in Dry Tortugas National Park south of Key West. But, Bimini Road truthers have claimed that at 15 feet deep, the road is just too deep for its location to be just the result of rising sea levels, and that the natural erosion rate should have only made it 3 feet deep, though Shin claims that its location is a combination of a little rise in sea levels and the scouring out of the sand underneath it. The truthers also find it hard to believe that the relatively undisturbed and uniform shape of the road would have been left intact if feet of sand had fallen out from under it, but a similar thing actually happened at Dry Tortugas National Park, when the storm waves of Hurricanes Charlie and Katrina in 2004 and 5 undermined the sand beneath the beach rock and caused it to fall around 1 meter. Bimini Road stands have also claimed that the inverted J-shape at the end of the longest row of the road is conclusive proof of its artificial construction, because otherwise how could it run perpendicular to Bimini's coastline? But a similar J-shaped spit has been found at the northern end of Pulley Ridge, a submerged former barrier island southwest of Florida which forms part of the western Florida shelf. It's mostly covered by coral, but the underlying rocks that have been exposed look almost exactly like what's at Bimini. Similar J-shapes can also be seen on modern barrier islands near tidal inlets across the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern United States, so it probably just formed on a vaguely hook-shaped spit of sand. But you're probably asking about those cement and marble columns supposedly discovered near the road. And they're probably real pieces of cement, but they probably got there because Portland cement was once transported aboard ships in wooden barrels, and those cement columns are thought to be the remains of such barrels, just with their wooden covers gone due to decay. So they were probably just chucked off-board because they weighed too much. I mean, those are pretty dangerous waters, that's the Bermuda Triangle right there. I mean, believe it or not, there are actually even more alleged Atlantean ruins dotted around the Biminis. Like this patch of sand surrounded by mangrove undergrowth on North Bimini, which Bimini truthers claim is a 500 foot long shark or fish geoglyph. I mean, there are bits of exposed sand right next to it that have no discernible shape. Oh wait, never mind, apparently they're supposed to be whales or something. The human mind is a wonderful thing. Then there's something called the Andros Temple, which was discovered right before the Bimini Road by some pilots later associated with Mars, named Robert Brush and Trigg Adams. They claim to have discovered the skillfully worked limestone foundations of a 60 by 100 foot temple structure somewhere off the island of Andros in 1968, which Valentine said reminded him of the Temple of the Turtles at Uxmal in the Yucatan. I mean, no s**t, they're both squares. And he claimed that they were composed of 3 foot thick walls rising 8 feet above the ocean floor. David Zink, you know that guy who thought that aliens built the Bimini Road, analyzed the temple for himself and found that it was composed of much smaller stones than had been initially reported, and also learned that a constable from Nassau named Reuben Russell admitted that he built it as a holding pen for sponges awaiting shipment abroad in the 30s during an interview with reporter John Kiesler from the Miami News. Somehow this gets even crazier, because some people think that the Biminis are home to the real fountain of youth. An episode of the fourth season of a show called In Search Of, presented by none other than Leonard Nimoy of all people, followed Les Hemingway, the younger brother of Ernest Hemingway, as he guided a TV crew to a sinkhole within the mangrove swamps of North Bimini, which some say is the actual fountain of youth, and which they imply was artificially made by the Atlanteans. Les Hemingway certainly swore by it, and he said his skin cancer went away after he soaked in it. And a doctor from Miami swore by it too, saying it had an exceptionally high lithium content. By the mid-2000s, local guides would charge $50 for taking you there, but there are a bunch of other supposed healing wells on the island, so you have your pick. All this hype over Bimini having the fountain of youth does sort of kind of have a basis in conquistador lore, because Ponce de Leon's famous 1513 expedition to Florida was meant to discover what he called the island of Benini, or Bimini. But the modern Bimini probably doesn't have any relation to the Bimini Ponce de Leon was looking for, since the earliest descriptions of Benini place it near the Gulf of Honduras, and it was probably referring to the rich Maya lands of the Yucatan. Plus, in his log, Ponce de Leon doesn't even call the modern Bimini's Bimini, he calls them La Vieja instead. Plus, he might have not even been looking for the fountain of youth at all, since the first person to identify finding it as the goal of the voyage was Oviedo in 1535. And believe it or not, there are somehow even wilder claims about the Biminis, both of which feature in that Leonard Nimoy documentary. A naturopathic physician named Dr. Raymond Brown claims to have been out looking for the shipwrecks of Spanish galleons one day, approximately 100 miles away from Bimini, near the tongue of the ocean, only to discover the ruins of an Egyptian or classical city seemingly submerged by some great cataclysm, which included the tip of a half-buried 400 foot tall pyramid 22 fathoms down. According to his story, he swam into it and discovered a strange crystal ball, capable of repelling metal. Unfortunately, most of his photographic equipment was conveniently destroyed in a storm, so there aren't actually any pictures of these fantastical discoveries. Surprise, surprise. But that didn't stop Dr. Brown from exhibiting his special crystal ball, which totally wasn't just bought from one of those New Age crystal shops, since people have reported seeing visions of pyramids and eyes when staring into it, and feeling breezes of ionic wind blowing close to it, cold and warm layers at various distances away from it, and hearing strange tingling and voices in its vicinity. Obviously this is all complete bullshit, but I just wanted to include it to show how gullible people can be. And finally, a celebrity psychic named Irene Hughes and a Miami radio host hired a plane to try and psychically spot the Bahamas Atlantis from the air until she thought she was above the buried ruins of a building made of pure marble. After two more years of searching for that building, a quote-unquote marble column base and a number of marble slabs were found. This is the only footage I could find of it. I guess the only thing to survive from Atlantis was a countertop. What a shame. On that note, if Bimini really was the harbor of Atlantis, you'd expect it to be crammed chock full of Atlantean artifacts, right? Well, obviously it isn't. In fact, real archaeological sites are nowhere to be found on the Biminis, despite multiple attempts to find them, and literally only a couple of pre-Columbian artifacts have ever been found there. When the modern islanders were questioned about it during one such attempt in 1955, they said that they were certain that no Indians had ever lived there. The only artifacts ever to be found on Bimini were found during a previous survey of the who found a perforated stone pendant and a sandstone spirit image, or zemi, which were both probably made by Bahamanian Arawaks, also known as Lucayans, who probably reached the Bahamas somewhere between 800 and 1000 AD. This is the furthest north a zemi has ever been found, actually, and there's an interesting reason for that. It turns out that there are actually exceptionally few archaeological sites and archaeological finds from the entire subtropical northern end of the Bahamas, probably because Manioc didn't grow well there, compared to the more tropical islands to the south, because those northernmost islands experience comparatively low winter temperatures. That includes the larger islands adjacent to the Mini, like Grand Bahama, Great Abaco, and Andros. These larger islands have a few cave sites and some pottery sherds from what's known as the Palmetto series, which is a shell-tempered ware in use by 1000 AD, but there aren't any middens except a small one on New Providence, even though they're plentiful further south from the Bahamas, and they're also none of the petroglyphs, effigy kelts, and monumental axes characteristic of Arawak culture. So the northern end of the Bahamas was probably only ever visited by hunting and fishing expeditions specifically looking to catch a capybara-esque rodent called the hutia, based on what's been found in the caves of Abaco Island, which would have been sent from permanent settlements in the central Bahamas. So I think it's fair to say that the Bimini's never held Atlantis, and the Bimini Road is actually just misidentified beach rock. So I think we all know what category it belongs in. And now on to our next entry, the Ica Stones. The Ica Stones are a bunch of rocks from the Ica Department of Peru that are supposedly thousands or even millions of years old and which depict all sorts of crazy stuff. People riding dinosaurs and flying around in spaceships, advanced surgery featuring IV bags and stethoscopes, like open heart surgery and apparently even brain transplants which I guess is code for lobotomy, accurate representations of various organs, telescopes, maps supposedly taken from satellite images and showing Atlantis despite looking like absolute crap, a lot of stupidly explicit stuff, and various constellations and comets and stuff. A lot of them are pretty small and can fit in the palm of your hands, but others are carved onto boulders. Most of the stones are held in the Museo Scientifico Javier Cabrera, just off the main plaza of the city of Ica, which consists of three large rooms just packed from floor to ceiling with them. Ancient aliens type guys really love them because they consider the stones fantastic proof of ancient extraterrestrial contact, and the same goes for creationists because of the stones that show humans and dinosaurs together. Which begs the question, if the civilization that made these actually existed and they were capable of taming dinosaurs and doing brain surgery, why couldn't they leave anything behind except random shallowly carved rocks? And they're generally way more crude than they've been made out to be, and they're certainly less impressive than most actual ancient pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru. Honestly, the animations of the Ica stones from this 1978 documentary are as impressive, if not more so, than they are themselves. So I really don't think they're authentic, especially since footage of them being made has actually been floating around for decades. But still, the story behind them is pretty interesting. And it's a story that revolves around two people, Professor Dr. Javier Cabrera d'Arquea, the namesake of that museum with all the stones in it, and a local indigenous farmer living in the nearby village of Ocucaje named Basilio Uxuya. Professor Dr. Cabrera was born in 1924 to a rather prestigious local family, because he descended from the founder of Ica City, a Spaniard named Don Luis Geronimo de Cabrera y Toledo, who lived between 1528 and 1574. The OG Cabrera explored all around Peru, Bolivia, and even Argentina, where he unfortunately met his end when he was executed in 1574 for establishing the city of Cordoba without permission. But without him, the 1.2 million modern inhabitants of that city wouldn't be living there, so at least his memory is secure, and the more modern Cabrera seems to have hung a portrait of him up in his stone museum, so there's that too. Dr. Cabrera also seems to have been a genuine pillar of his community, since he was head of the Department of Preventative Medicine, and he actually helped to establish Ica's San Luis Gonzaga University, where he was the Chair of Anthropology and Biological Sciences. You might remember that university's name from Part 2, because it just so happens to be where some of Jaime Molsan's alien mummies are supposedly kept. Anyways, in his autobiography, Dr. Cabrera claims that the first carved stone he saw was found on his father's land when he was 16, so in 1940. But his interest in them really began in adulthood, on his 42nd birthday in 1966, when a childhood friend and patient named Felix Romero gifted him a stone, bearing a carving of what he perceived as an unknown extinct fish. It was supposed to just be a paperweight, but it sparked in Cabrera a passion, nay, an obsession for the stones, which would never abate. After receiving the stone, Cabrera then approached the director of the Ica Regional Museum, Adolfo Bermudez Jenkins, which it's now named after, to see the stones which his friend had told him had wound up in its collection. And even though the director let him personally inspect those stones, he told Cabrera that an official scientific study of them wasn't necessary because he had already been informed that they were created by the same people who had sold them in the Okukahe district in the desert south of Ica City, probably as tourist kitsch. But Cabrera remained unconvinced and stubbornly believed that the stones still had real scientific worth, especially after seeing this one supposedly found in a wheeled tomb during actual archaeological excavations being published in a Lima newspaper, so he proceeded to buy 300 or so more stones from two brothers named Carlos and Pablo Soldi, who had also been getting them from the peasants of Okukahe since 1961. Collecting the stones became a bit of an obsession for Cabrera, though, because by the 70s he had acquired a mind-boggling amount of them, between 11 and 14 thousand, bought from other local collectors as well as some peasants in Okukahe, likely including one Señor Basilio Ushuaia. On January 17th, 1975, the Lima-based magazine Mundial published an article in which Ushuaia and a woman named Irma Gutierrez de Aparcana, also from Okukahe, revealed that they were the ones responsible for making all of Cabrera's strange stones. Cabrera dismisses their statements because he claimed that they just lied to not be arrested for illegally looting real artifacts, because the police did question them about that for a few days, but there's way more proof that Ushuaia was the main guy responsible for making these. It's also possible that he wrote, Making these stones is easier than farming the land in his written confession to the media, but I can't really read Spanish and I definitely can't read cursive, so I can't confirm that. In 1977, as part of the Nova-slash-BBC documentary The Case of the Ancient Astronauts, which goes over Erich von Däniken's various alien claims, Ushuaia readily allowed himself to be filmed creating one of the Ika stones with a steel knife and revealed that he'd created the stone's distinct patina by baking it in the dung of a local donkey, shown here, for an hour before covering the stone in nail polish. Ushuaia showed the same process, except with a saw, to Erich von Däniken himself for his book According to the Evidence, published earlier that same year, but von Däniken claims that Basilio's stones look nothing like Cabrera's stones and that his are just unimaginative, less artistic, and more primitive copies, even though the transplant scene Ushuaia produced for the documentary crews looks identical to the scenes in Cabrera's museum. When Ushuaia was presented with the pictures of the Ika stones in Cabrera's collection featured within von Däniken's book, like this guy with a magnifying glass, he also confessed that they were also his handiwork, and that more specifically, they were some of the first stones he made for Cabrera around ten years previously. For his part, Cabrera denied ever having bought from Ushuaia for knowing that he was the stone's manufacturer, but Ushuaia was able to produce a handwritten note on a newspaper supposedly signed by Cabrera and dated 1971 thanking him for the stones. Obviously, the authenticity of this is up for debate, but it exists. And then, in a 1978 documentary entitled Are We Alone in the Universe?, Ushuaia actually shows the exact public school primer illustrations he used as models for his carvings, including the exact outdated mid-20th century dinosaur models the stones show, incredibly detailed diagrams of the cardiovascular system which are possibly reflected in all these stones with really hyper-detailed hearts on them, and illustrations of the non-Peruvian animals like kangaroos which appear in his work. People like von Däniken and Cabrera himself have claimed that Ushuaia couldn't have possibly produced the thousands of stones in Cabrera's museum with the limited time he had, but in that same 1977 documentary, he's shown with hundreds of them, and dozens of the same sort of wooden sculptures that are in Cabrera's museum, all over his house. And years later, in his old age, he was visited by a guy named Brian Forrester, who we mentioned in the last part and who's going to be at the core of the next entry, who confirmed that Ushuaia still had some of the Ica stones in his home. Forrester also claims that Ushuaia kept selling them on to tourists after the documentary aired. Oh, and on top of that, Ushuaia had an army of kids to help him, anywhere between 8 to 12 of the little guys, and his wife was also filmed helping him. Von Däniken also claims that he looked at one of the stones under a microscope and saw that its grooves were filled with microorganisms and oxidation. But on the contrary, Cabrera lent the same 1977 documentary crew one of his stones, and they gave it to the Institute of Geological Sciences in London, now known as the British Geological Survey, which concluded that the edges of the grooves on it are distinctly uneroded and still remain sharp and relatively clean-cut despite their supposed age, which is clearly visible with the naked eye. And it's also pretty clear that the grooves on these carvings aren't filled with the suspiciously brown oxidation covering the rest of the stones. And I can't forget that Von Däniken also claims that Ushuaia couldn't possibly have made the stones because they depict stuff that isn't real, and he said he used models from photographs and illustrations. So since those things always show stuff that's real, and the stones depict stuff that isn't real, they just can't possibly be his. Von Däniken's gonna come in for a real surprise when he first learns about artistic license. And finally, an American show about the paranormal called Sightings released an episode about the Ika stones nearly two decades later in 1996, in which Cabrera admits that most of the stones in his collection were found in the 60s, which is sort of suspicious, isn't it? Like, if they're real, why weren't they being found in similarly huge numbers before, and why aren't they still being found? But all those different arguments didn't stop Cabrera from assigning the stones to an extraterrestrial race he referred to as Glyptolithic Man, which might have come to Earth from the Pleiades and coexisted with dinosaurs 405 million years ago, according to him, and genetically engineered modern people out of highly intelligent primates before being destroyed by a huge cataclysm. In addition, Cabrera believed that the carvings on the stones aren't just depictions of daily life for Glyptolithic Man, they're messages, almost a form of writing deliberately left in the sands of Okakage for future Peruvians to find. And according to him, all these stones are basically saying that we're headed for another cataclysm because we've been too selfish and we've made the planetary ecosystem too unbalanced and we don't respect the environment enough. Cabrera disseminated these beliefs through conferences, television spots, and lectures in Peru and abroad. He even supposedly gave a lecture in front of the Queen of Sweden in Stockholm one time, and fittingly, his book on the stones is entitled El Mensaje de las Piedras Grabadas de Ica, or The Message of the Engraved Stones of Ica, which is supposed to clarify the mysteries of the human race in life, which is pretty ambitious, I'd say. Dr. Cabrera wound up managing the museum for a total of 35 years, from right after he became interested in the stones in 1966 all the way up until his death in 2001. He left his medical practice in 1996 to run the museum full time. From what I've heard, his museum continues to be run by his family. Also, just one last thing. The museum's website claims that dinosaur fossils found at Okakage back up the authenticity of the stones, and it has a whole gallery of pictures of them. Okakage's desert doesn't actually hold any of the dinosaurs on the Ica stones, but it does hold something almost as cool. The remains of giant monster whales with razor-sharp teeth that would have basically been real-life Loch Ness monsters. And it's filled with a bunch of different ones. It's revealed a 34-to-41-million-year-old Eocene basilosaurus with two nicknames. Some call it the Okakage Predator, which just makes it sound like a pervert, and El Monstro de Peru. But regardless, its impressive remains are on display at the National University of San Marcos. There's also this 9.8-to-8.9-million-year-old Miocene one from a species only identified in 2008 with its discovery, named Leviathan Melvillea, which has also been called the Assassin Whale of Peru, and for good reason. It has 36-centimeter-long teeth, but it probably would have been pretty easy to spot if it was looking to eat you, because it was also probably 60 feet long. The Okakage area is also filled with the remains of ancient dolphins and sharks, including some good ol' megalodons, from as late as 3 million years ago, when the area transformed from a shallow sea or bay into, you know, a desert. Unbelievably, another half-Irish Cabrera, named Roberto Penny Cabrera, has been described as the hero of the Okakage Desert, because he's dedicated himself to protecting those fossils from motorcycle-riding fossil looters. He also alleges that some of the looted fossils have actually been whisked out of Peru with the help of corrupt officials, which said officials obviously deny. But that would be a pretty cool premise for an action movie full of B-listers. Anyway, so yeah, those stones are 100% fake. They're going in the fortress tab. But anyways, if you want to see real ancient artifacts in Ica, go to the Museo Regional de Ica. It has all sorts of stuff, including one of the best collections of our next entry! The Paracas Skulls! The Paracas Skulls refer to the distinctly elongated skulls left behind by some individuals from Peru's ancient Paracas culture, the precursors of the Nazca. Ica sits pretty close to the Paracas Peninsula and the town of Paracas, where the culture gets its name, so it makes sense that some of them wound up in its museum. Tons of different cultures around the world and across time practiced artificial cranial deformation by meddling with the malleable skulls of their infants, even into the modern day. But some people believe that the Paracas Skulls can't possibly be the result of that, and are actually the way they are because their original owners either belonged to some new non-human species and-slash-or because they had genetic ties to the humans of the old world. Because, why not? And by some people, I'm mainly referring to Brian Forrester, who we briefly met in the last entry, and in the last episode when we were talking about the Sabu Disc, because he's really keen on the idea that ancient Egyptian stonework is too precise to have been made by the ancient Egyptians. But in addition to meandering around ancient Egyptian sites and saying they're too advanced to have been made by the ancient Egyptians, he's also fond of meandering around Inca ruins while saying they're too advanced to have been made by the Incas. He's actually created a whole tour company based around doing just that called Hidden Inca Tours and it's the lifeblood of his YouTube channel, which has over 400,000 subscribers, so props to him. I'm not jelly, and he's released over a dozen books about it, some of which are allegedly partially plagiarized from Wikipedia. All these different avenues heavily promote his research into the Paracas Skulls and his changing interpretations of them, because he seems to think that the people with these sorts of skulls belong to a distinct species or race who built Peru's most impressive ancient monuments. Forrester points to the fact that the volume of a skull is genetically predetermined and can't be changed as evidence of these Paracas Coneheads being their own distinct thing, because he also claims that the skulls are up to double the volume of normal ones, despite admitting that that's just estimating. But this has been disproven with water displacement tests on casts done by a great YouTuber named John Perry, he's done a bunch of videos about this, and by filling real ones in Peru with quinoa, or whatever this is. Both tests have shown that both these Paracas Skulls and average skulls have the same volumes, the Paracas ones are just narrower. Since Forrester thinks the conehead thing is genetic instead of the result of head binding, he's also tried to pass off this old 1851 illustration of a child's mummy as a fetus who'd been floating around in the womb with that big ol' noggin. But I mean, it has teeth. Fetuses don't usually have teeth. He also points to how some of them lack sagittal sutures, which every human being has at the back of their heads, as proof that they're special. This is ignoring the fact that skull sutures just naturally fuse with age, which is called suture obliteration, which is surprisingly metal. He also claims that their form and magnums, which is the hole that connects the spine to the skull or whatever, are too small and too far back on the bottom of their head to make them human, but if you compare the distances to the front of the head, you'll see that they're in the exact same spot as normal skulls. Forrester also says that they have other unique features, like unusually prominent zygomatic arches or cheekbones, eye sockets that are 50% larger than normal, and how they're unusually tall. By the way, the eye thing probably isn't true, but the illusion that they're larger is probably caused by the facial prognathism head binding usually leads to. But ignoring all this, Forrester is determined to learn exactly where these conehead people come from. So to find out where they're really from, spoiler alert, not Peru, according to him, he subjected various skulls to DNA tests. In February of 2014, he announced that initial DNA analysis of one of the skulls, conducted by an unidentified geneticist, showed that the Paracas skull people belonged to a completely new species, with mitochondrial mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far, making the original owner a new human-like creature very distant from Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. But two years later, in 2016, he organized a second round of DNA testing for multiple skulls which revealed that the first guy was actually a total lunatic and the Paracas were actually human. Surprise, surprise, it's just that they actually come from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This time, Forrester's methods were a bit more thorough. Four skulls dating to between 2200 and 800 years ago were subjected to testing. Three were from the Museo Arqueologico Paracas, and one was from a private collection in the States, and they were tested using both hair samples and bone samples drilled out of the skull's supposedly anomalous form in magnums. These samples were then sent to three different labs, one in Canada and two in the States, and the geneticists who worked on them weren't told the sample's origin. Because I guess the last guy Forrester used wasn't up to the challenge. Three out of three of the successfully tested hair samples showed hapogroup H2A, which is primarily found in Eastern Europe and was present in the Proto-Indo-European. And the bone powder sample from the biggest skulls tested showed T2B, which is found in Europe, North Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. That last bit fits perfectly with the headcanon of Forrester's colleague L.A. Marzulli, who helped organize and publish the lab results, because he believes that the Paracas people were in fact the Nephilim from the Bible, who he thinks were themselves human-alien hybrids, because of course they were. Then earlier this year, in April, Forrester released a video saying that a further twelve or thirteen skulls had been successfully tested by Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, widely regarded as the greatest city in Canada, and UCLA in L.A. Four of the skulls were from mitochondrial haplogroup B, which is common among Native Americans, but there was also U2E, which was also present in the Proto-Indo-Europeans because of their ties to earlier hunter-gatherers, H2, and H1A, which is also mainly found in Europe. So Forrester thinks that the Paracas people originated in the Caucasus, or the Crimea, like three thousand years ago, and then migrated to the Persian Gulf, and then sailed from there all the way to Paracas. So that's one explanation for all this, but think a more likely explanation is contamination. In archaeological sites, even in-situ remains can become contaminated, and some of the skulls Forrester used come from private collections, so who knows how many people handled them. Mitochondrial DNA is the most easily accessible kind of DNA, but that also makes it pretty susceptible to contamination. I can't prove that, but what I can show you is that there have been other studies of the mitochondrial DNA of the ancient Paracas people, like this one from 2010, which shows a completely different picture. The 2010 one was able to extract mitochondrial DNA from 38 Paracas individuals, and shows that they predominantly belonged to mitochondrial haplogroup D, but also C and A, to a much lesser extent. Which makes sense, since those are all normal South American native haplogroups. And there's absolutely no way their samples were contaminated. They really went all out to prevent it. The DNA from every single person who made contact with the samples used were put into a database, and any samples thought to possibly be contaminated by them wasn't used. Plus, every dead individual studied had DNA extracted from them twice, just to be safe. The results of the study show that they had a high affinity with the modern native populations of middle and southern Chile, specifically the Yagan people, and not modern Peruvians, oddly enough. They also have similarly high frequencies of haplogroups C and D. But that probably isn't because the Paracas moved south, instead it's probably a remnant of the initial peopling of the Americas. They were also pretty much the same genetically as the people of the succeeding Nazca culture, which makes sense, since they both made big geoglyphs and had similar art, and lived in the same area. You can say what you want about the dang Nazca lines, but you can see from their skeletons that they were anything but a different species. So I don't know about you, but I'd trust this study way more than I do foresters. I know some viewers are gonna say, oh, well, this is just an establishment cover-up of this new, daring science, but then you gotta take into consideration that this study predates forester studies by years, so one of them is right, and one of them is wrong. But ignoring all that, there's another thing you could point at to try and convince someone that the Paracas skulls belong to Europeans. Their oddly reddish and occasionally blonde-looking hair. But as genuinely odd as it does look, there is actually a simple explanation for it. Everyone's hair contains mixtures of two compounds, known as eumelanin and pheo, where pheo-melanin. Eumelanin controls black and brown hair, while pheomelanin controls yellow and red hair. Pheomelanin degrades more gradually than eumelanin, so as eumelanin gets oxidized, pheomelanin and the red and yellow coloration remain. So that's probably why some of these mummies have reddish and yellowish hair. And that's why ultimately, I think that the Paracas skulls aren't from a different species, or from Europeans, or from Nephilim, or from aliens, or whatever. They just belong to people like you and I. Except that they had intelligence plus 100 and may have been connected to Yakub. I'm still trying to figure that stuff out. So these jumbla skulls fit firmly within our favorite category, the Misinterpretations category. It's getting pretty full, isn't it? I think I might have to change the format a little bit. So let's head on over to our last entry of the day, and the very last entry of the second level of the iceberg, the Gosford Glyphs. And by that, I'm referring to these crude mock hieroglyphs carved into the two 3.5 meter high sandstone walls lining a little rock cleft within Brisbane Water National Park near the town of Gosford, along the central coast of New South Wales, Australia. It's about an hour north of Sydney by car, and about a 30 minute hike from suburbia, since it's at the base of a 241 meter hill known as Lyre Trigg, which is surrounded by over 20 real aboriginal petroglyph sites. But anyways, the Gosford Glyphs consist of 100 to 300 different, rather poorly executed fake hieroglyphs. And you might be saying, oh that's a bit harsh, give them a chance. I'm sorry, I just can't after seeing this stick figure. Like come on! There's only so much you can get away with. There's just no way you can expect me to treat these as potentially being real ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But if you're still unconvinced, I'll give you more reasons to doubt their authenticity. For example, there's this poor rendition of Khufu's throne name, Khufu, and an odd square cartouche possibly meant to resemble a seric, which was used to write a completely different type of royal name called the Horus name, as well as another cartouche that might read as a garbled version of Snefru, the name of Khufu's father. And there are other equally crude etchings of Egyptian motifs, like this club-footed Anubis holding what I can only assume is a rosary, because I've never seen an elk like that. But even though they're just an illegible, disorganized selection of random signs, that hasn't stopped people from claiming that they tell a story, the story of two sons of Khufu named Nefertiru and Jessib, who somehow made a beeline from the waters off Egypt to southeastern Australia and somehow also never even showed up in any actual Egyptian sources, despite us knowing about 13 of Khufu's sons and daughters. There's also the fact that the hieroglyphs come from different eras of Egyptian history. Also, about those cartouches, the incorrectly spelled version of Snefru's name is taught by the phrase Sa-Ra, or Son of Ra, which preceded the pharaoh's birth name, or nomen, for most of Egyptian history. But the whole idea of adding Sa-Ra on top of nomens was only first implemented during the reign of Jedefre, or Rajadef, the son and successor of Khufu. So if these guys were thousands of miles away from Egypt when the Sa-Ra convention first started being used, how would they have been able to add it here? If you're still unconvinced, I'll prove to you that this looks absolutely nothing like the real inscriptions and relief carvings the Egyptians really did leave outside of the Nile Valley in Khufu's reign, which were left as testimonies to expeditions which were carried out for specific, practical purposes. For example, Khufu sent expeditions consisting of hundreds of men deep into the Libyan desert to collect a mineral powder used for painting the color red, called methot, and these men left far better inscriptions at a rock face on this little sandstone hill southwest of Dakhla Oasis. It's not the pinnacle of Egyptian art by any means, but it's definitely way more polished and way more organized than this. When excavated, the site around this relief also yielded additional evidence of the expedition's stay that's completely absent from Gosford, like all sorts of pottery, some 60 seal impressions probably made out in the desert, and hearths, one of which revealed a quite bizarre find, a bunch of roasted locusts, so they might have been getting a bit desperate out there. And we also know that he sent out genuine sailing expeditions not to Australia, but to the Sinai, where the Egyptians procured copper and turquoise. We know this thanks to excavations at the ancient ports of Wadi al-Jarf and Ain Sukna on the west coast of the Gulf of Suez, which are home to dozens of huge storage galleries protected by stone portcullises probably used to store dismantled boats based on the timbers found in them, as well as large quantities of storage jars. Out in Wadi al-Jarf's harbor, there's also this big L-shaped breakwater where 21 limestone anchors were left behind. It's also where some of the oldest papyri documents in Egypt come from, including the Papyrus Diary of Merer, which recounts the author's role in the finishing stages of building the Great Pyramid, and actually dates to the same year as the Dakhla inscription, the 27th year of Khufu's reign. So why isn't any of this stuff in Australia? Returning back to Wadi al-Jarf, the site's probably linked to the small fortress site of Tel Ras Boudran on the opposite side of the Suez Gulf, on the west coast of the Sinai. Wadi al-Jarf may have also been where expeditions to Punt around Eritrea started, but that's pretty speculative. Anyways, that fortress I mentioned was probably a rest stop to long-visited sites in the Wadi Magharah and at Sarabit al-Qadim, where the Egyptians got their turquoise. Khufu's men also left their mark in the Wadi Magharah, known then as the Terrace of Turquoise, with this impressive relief, which is just incomparable to the Gosford Glyphs, even though they're basically supposed to be the same thing. Also, if Khufu could just send out expeditions to Australia and have his name carved into Australia all willy-nilly, why aren't there any other inscriptions of his anywhere else from the Red Sea to Sydney? Plus, the inscriptions are just way too fresh to be 4,500 years old. If you compare it with nearby aboriginal petroglyphs, you'll see that the real petroglyphs are way more rounded and smoother than the glyphs due to erosion. The ones at the Bulgandri site here, which are actually in the exact same national park as the glyphs, are anywhere between 200 and 1,000 years old, and it features nice little scenes of ancestral heroes, wallaby hunting, kangaroos, dolphins, birds, and more, etched into what's supposedly the same sort of soft sandstone that the glyphs are etched into. And as you can see, they display considerably more erosion than the glyphs. So how can the glyphs be older than them? You might point at how the glyphs are covered in lichen as evidence of their age, but that doesn't really mean much because the damp cleft they're in is the perfect environment for them to grow really quickly, and all the tourists coming to touch the rocks just transfers nutrients to them. So what's the real story of these, I hear you ask? Well, nothing's set in stone, but there are multiple stories. Egyptologist Boyo Okinga of Macquarie University theorized that it was created by soldiers returning from the First World War, when many Anzac troops were stationed in Egypt, and one veteran is known to have carved a replica sphinx and some pyramids as a memorial to his fallen brethren at Kuringai National Park. But it seems like the glyphs were first noticed back in around 1975 by a surveyor for Gosford City Council named Alan Dash, who had never seen them before despite working there since 1968. Every time he visited the spot over the next five years, he noticed new hieroglyphs had appeared. Almost a decade later, in 1984, a ranger with Australia's National Parks and Wildlife Service at Gosford named Neil Martin, who was in the Gosford glyphs area putting out a fire, actually spotted whoever was responsible for the carvings as he was carving out hieroglyphs. It turned out to be an old man from Yugoslavia of all places, and he was chipping away at the stone with a side-chrome coal chisel. Oi mate, what's that sound coming from the old bush? Oi mate, you can't be doing this here. You can't be illegally vandalising the National Park, the National Water Park. Say mate, who are you? You look a little familiar maybe, you look a little Yugoslavian maybe. I am you. Oi mate, what the bloody kookaburra was that mate? Oh, it seems he left his side-chrome chisel maybe, mate. Neil Martin confiscated the chisel because the guy was illegally vandalising a part of the National Park, but he decided to let him off the hook because he seemed to be either mentally ill or mentally handicapped. Apparently, that very chisel was donated to the local historical society, so the thing physically responsible for creating the Gosford glyphs could still be hidden somewhere in Gosford to this day. After a guy named Paul White began publicising the glyphs in magazine articles he wrote in 1994 and 1996 respectively, the glyphs have received tons of attention, and ever since the 90s people have been digging between the glyphs in search of hidden Egyptian treasure. So the local rangers still have to regularly confiscate all the tools they leave behind, which is sort of poetic, eh? And there's actually been a bit of controversy surrounding them lately because the National Park Service has been removing what it says are dangerous boulders around the glyph site, but it seems like they made a real mess of the place. So that's it for the glyphs, but here's a far more genuine and far more mysterious Egyptian find from Australia. This little bronze coin. It was found sometime between 1910 and 1915 in the far north of Queensland, four miles inland from Kawara Beach at the top of the Macalester Range by a settler named Andrew Henderson, and he supposedly found it as he was digging a fence post on his land. The exact depth of the find sort of varies from source to source, some later sources claim it was half a metre down, but the earliest accounts suggest it was just two to three inches deep. This is incredibly weird because Mr. Henderson's land was smack bang in the middle of a dense tropical jungle, and was also still heavily timbered, but it was along an aboriginal trackway. I really don't think Mr. Henderson could have faked this, because after finding it, he proceeded to just leave it in a drawer for forty years until he gifted it to the ten-year-old son of his neighbour, Joe Gilmore, around 1953. Remarkably, this neighbour had actually served in Egypt during the Second World War, which apparently allowed him to recognize the thing's significance, since he recognized the distinct profile of Zeus Amon on the obverse, and soon enough, it was identified as an undeniably genuine chunky little bronze coin, possibly a tetrabol, belonging to Ptolemy IV, even though it's pretty beat up. It was recently given to the Cairns Museum in 2019, so hopefully it's visible to the public now. It's possible that the coin was just an heirloom that dropped out of the pocket of some unlucky prospector travelling along the aboriginal trackway on his way to the Hodgkinson Goldfields west of Cairns, where there was a bit of a gold rush in the 1870s, since that gold rush attracted thousands of different people from all over the place, because everyone loves them some gold, so maybe one of them just happened to collect ancient coins, I mean, I do it. But on the other hand, it is still possible that it somehow got to Queensland in antiquity. The local aboriginal people don't have any oral history involving the Egyptians, and I don't think any Egyptians would have ever gone directly to Australia, but who says the coin can't have gotten there second or third hand, after it had travelled along different trade routes, as one author put it. We know that, unlike Egypt under Khufu, Ptolemaic Egypt was hooked up to Indian Ocean trade routes through Red Sea ports like Myos Hormos and Berenike, perfectly represented by the various Buddhist statues that made their way to Egypt through that, so maybe, just maybe, the coin wound up way further than it was supposed to go and pass through way more hands than usual and wound up beyond the Wallace Line. Queensland is the closest part of Australia to anywhere else, so maybe it was brought there by Torres Islanders, or people from New Guinea, or possibly even sea cucumber fishermen from Makassar travelling to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Who knows? So, ultimately, I'm going to classify the Gosford Glyphs as a straight up forgery, and this mysterious little coin as genuine. Because any way you look at it, it is a genuine Upart, it's a genuine artifact, and it was found in a place that, in any circumstance, it shouldn't have been in. Anyways, I'd like to thank my good friends, Dhruv Singhal, Booga420, Bajun, Harrison Timperley, Doc Bossman, Kevin Ryan, Ayanami Amamami, Bom Tom Vadil, Danny Banani, Rose Klein, James Kirk, Alyssa P, Mark Elliot Cullen, Shemek Wierzbitski, our old friend, Jack Lester, Mithridates, Jake the Snake, Liv Buller, Tyler Doucette, Inbred Cat, Have a Cigar, Alex Clark, Jess Sullivan, Ak Yune, Giovanna Lazzarini, Mark Krupnik, Mija Kneedog, Michael, Daisies for Ghosts, Kaylin P, Julie Lau, Moony, and Zafiro. I would also like to give a big thanks and a hearty welcome to our newest sponsors, Bean Boerito, The Spoofer, Emily Cujo, Stevon, always love seeing a fellow Steven, and Gryphon Frost. Or Griffin Frost, sorry. This video took quite a while to make, and that's still a bit of an understatement, so my next project is definitely going to be way shorter, and it's probably going to be about something completely different, something, it probably won't even be an iceberg, so you'll probably really like it if you're into geographical anomalies and ancient European history. I know that sounds confusing, but you'll get it when it's out. I have a way less crowded schedule this semester, so expect more uploads more often. Anyways, that's enough out of me, peace.